


Things Wanted but Never Obtained

by The Chronicler (AgentFrostbite)



Series: Being Open is Not a Weakness [4]
Category: X-Men (Alternate Timeline Movies), X-Men (Movieverse), X-Men - All Media Types
Genre: Babyfic, Charles Xavier is a Good Friend, Emma Frost Has a Heart, Emma Frost is a Good Mommy, Emma Frost needs friends whether or not she wants to admit it, Emma is surprisingly good at taking care of a baby, Gen, Minor Hank McCoy/Raven | Mystique, No matter how hard she tries to keep it hidden behind diamond walls, Not plot so much as family bonding, Sort Of, Team as Family, The X-Men have no idea how to take care of a baby, Well they're not there quite yet, and a little angst, but they're working on it, kind of a bittersweet ending
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-19
Updated: 2020-11-19
Packaged: 2021-03-09 21:50:03
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,386
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27632999
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AgentFrostbite/pseuds/The%20Chronicler
Summary: The X-Men volunteer to watch over an infant after a failed kidnapping attempt by an anti-mutant group. The only problem is that none of the X-Men actually know how to take care of a baby...except Emma, who quickly puts herself in charge of caring for little Tommy, revealing a part of herself she has tried very hard to keep under lock and key.
Series: Being Open is Not a Weakness [4]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1985278
Comments: 1
Kudos: 6





	Things Wanted but Never Obtained

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [All the little fishes](https://archiveofourown.org/works/519041) by [tahariel](https://archiveofourown.org/users/tahariel/pseuds/tahariel). 



> The idea of Emma having a job as a babysitter and being good with kids - which is basically this whole story - was inspired by tahariel's "All the little fishes," where Emma is a babysitter, and MAN, that would be such an ace job for a telepath to have.

Things Wanted But Never Obtained

Emma watched as Erik, Charles, Hank, and Raven all – not argued, but 'debated at volume' – with each other as to what to do with the squirming thing that Erik was holding. She was beyond amused by the situation. Surely, a room full of such mature adults could handle one baby.

But no, they most certainly couldn't, and as a result, Erik and Raven were now ganging up on Charles for accepting to help the hapless couple whose child was currently being hunted by yet another extremist group hell-bent on turning mutants into their own personal weapons. Hank was of no help at all, and he only stood there and tried to decide how they should handle the situation, with Raven occasionally breaking from her joint-argument with Erik to yell at Hank for A) Not stopping Charles, and B) Not being man enough to own up to his hand in the situation.

Emma let them all yell at each other until just before little Tommy got really upset, and then she stood from her seat on the couch. She might've been part of their little group, but she was still a Frost, so her expensive white Italian leather dress accentuated her fluid movements as she strode across the room. Only the best of everything for a Frost, after all.

She took _that_ thought and shoved it as deep down as she could get it, pointedly not gagging at her mother's presumptuous words.

"My God, you're all so pathetic," she chided with a smirk as she held her arms out to take the boy. Erik hesitated for only a second, and she didn't fault him for it. Erik had trust issues, after all, and he had a habit of thinking everything through at least twice before doing anything he thought might be risky.

He did eventually hand Tommy over, and Emma went from 'ice queen' to 'bubbly nanny' in a half a second. "Hi. Hiya- oh, what pretty eyes you have."

The baby reached out and pawed at Emma's nose. It was a common thing that all of the babies she'd ever interacted with did. She wondered if it had something to do with how she used her telepathy to project a feeling of _calm/happy/relax_ into their little heads. As if the nose was the button and pressing it would somehow make the new feelings stronger. And like every time before, she chuckled fondly.

"Yeah, that's my nose. You wanna see where yours is?"

"Ah!" he exclaimed. She laughed and, cradling him with one arm, lightly tapped his nose with her finger. "Gah?"

"Yeah, right there."

"What the hell am I looking at?" Raven asked. Emma shot her what Sean called her 'snap look,' where she expressed a second's worth of intense displeasure before returning to whatever it was that she'd been doing before. He likened it to the snap of a whip. Hence the name.

"So now you have a problem with swearing?" Erik asked skeptically. She rebalanced little Tommy – who had taken an interest in Emma's gold half-curls – and gave Erik a longer annoyed look.

"No. I have a problem swearing _around children_ ," she shot back. "No matter how old." Hank's eyebrows had not yet descended from his hairline, so her next sentence was, "Do I have something on my face, Dr. McCoy?" She only called him by his formal title when she was feeling particularly irked. Hank, taking the hint, stuttered out a 'no' and promptly left the room with some half-thought excuse of analyzing Tommy's DNA to discover his mutation, or something like that. Raven still looked like she'd been hit in the face with a frying pan, and Charles was actually chuckling very quietly.

"And what shall we do in the meantime, Ms. Frost?" he asked with warmth in his voice.

"You can start by digging out a cradle; I'm sure your parents must've kept one." He nodded and rolled off toward storage. Neither Erik nor Raven were smart enough to escape by offering to help him. "Raven – or Erik; I don't care which – one of you run down to the store and pick up some baby supplies. Diapers, bottle, formula, the whole nine yards." Tommy gave a small yawn and settled in to sleep on her shoulder.

Raven nodded and strode out. It was probably better that the shapeshifter went. She'd adopt a body the cashier would likely never see again and change it before she got to the car. The less threads that attached the X-Mansion to the outside world, the better.

Erik, meanwhile, was still standing there like an idiot. Emma raised an eyebrow at him. "And?" she asked.

"You haven't ordered me around yet," he answered. She let her eyes travel to the top left corner of the room, her usual expression of quick thinking.

_Read?_ Tommy thought. Emma let a small smile pull at her lips.

"Go get Charles to pull out a couple books. Tommy likes them." Erik nodded and headed off to do her bidding. Okay, it wasn't exactly like that, but it was fun to phrase it that way. She turned and walked back to the couch with Tommy still half-asleep on her shoulder. The small smile that had only tugged at her lips now became a real, fond one.

* * *

It was, by far, the most interesting week Raven had had since one of Charles' lectures convened with one of her finals. It was very revealing.

Emma, to the absolute astonishment of everyone in the Mansion, was a natural. She'd obviously had plenty of experience, and it didn't take long for Raven to work out that she was using her telepathy for a great many things. It also didn't take long for Raven to work out that Emma _adored_ kids. She might've put on a half-decent show of being annoyed by their inability to take care of a baby, but Raven could tell that she was having the time of her life watching little Tommy.

Charles was okay with kids, and always had been, but his mind was far into the advanced side of things, and occasionally, he had trouble working out where the line was between understandable and advanced lay. It was fine with Tommy, who was still too young to be bored by what people were saying to him. Or maybe it was because Charles tended to project excitement just a little when he himself was excited. She still wasn't sure if he was doing it on purpose or not.

Hank was a natural, like Emma, but was so far into the self-conscious and self-doubting part of the spectrum that Emma had to hold his hand, not because he needed the help, but because he needed the confidence. Once Emma assured him that, no, he wasn't going to accidentally screw up someone else's kid, he was really good with Tommy. He enjoyed it, too, but not as much as Emma did. When Raven watched him play with Tommy, she could actually imagine that Tommy was his kid. And when he caught her watching and smiled at her, she could almost pretend that Tommy was her kid, too.

Erik was less of a natural than Hank, and his problem was that he was much more… Raven didn't want to say 'battle-oriented,' but that really was the best description. He was capable, yeah, but he was a little impatient. He knew it, too. That almost made it worse, that he had a problem and the problem was him. As such, he was less inclined to help directly, but was more than happy to help indirectly. He was great with fetching things or getting rooms set up in advance, but around Tommy, he tended to be a little awkward. Tommy enjoyed watching the spoons dance, so Erik did still get some smiles out of the whole thing.

Alex, Angel, and Sean were all helpful in their own ways. None of them wanted to be caretakers, per se, and Emma seemed totally fine with that. Alex was in charge of amusement, since he had a baby brother and knew a little something about making kids laugh. Angel was in charge of certain feeding times, mostly because she could get the munchkin, as Alex had taken to calling him, to quiet down enough to eat. Her wings fascinated the little mutant. Sean was in charge of watching him while he was asleep, making sure he didn't suffocate himself with the blanket and that he was warm but not too warm and other such stuff.

Raven herself was a bit of a jack-of-all-trades. She could play caretaker, but only if Emma was out and Hank was busy. She, like her semi-boyfriend, had a lack of self-confidence, but not to the degree Hank struggled with. Tommy _loved_ her blue, scaly skin. Loved it. He especially loved it when she made it ripple. He giggled for a whole minute straight, and she'd ended up laughing too. She had also caught Hank watching, out of the corner of her eyes, but she didn't mention it or look at him.

And Tommy was so gentle with her, with all of them. Like they were the fragile ones. It was really interesting to watch. She wondered if part of his powers was empathy or something like that. Emma acted like she expected it, so maybe it was something else entirely. She could tell that Emma projected thoughts and feelings to him frequently, because every time he got stubborn and fussy, she'd walk by and he'd calm down just like that.

It was a late night at the Mansion when Raven finally got the guts to ask Emma about it. "How come you're so good with kids?"

Emma, who'd been filing her nails, looked up. She actually seemed conflicted on how to answer that, which never happened with the normally confident telepath. The silence stretched for just long enough that the younger woman thought the diamond-shifting telepath was about to brush her off.

"My father believed strongly in a good work ethic."

Raven froze.

Emma didn't speak about her family. Everyone knew that Alex's parents and brother still loved him, that Sean's grandmother would write once or twice a month, that Angel's brother was still looking for her (and not for a good reason), that Erik's entire family had been wiped out in the holocaust, that Raven's own parents shunned her, that Charles liked his real father far more than he ever liked his step-father.

But Emma did not speak of her family. _Ever_.

"We were," she continued, "as Alex so eloquently calls it, filthy stinking rich, but he believed my sisters and I ought to have some sense of working for what you earn. My mother, of course, was almost appalled by the very idea of her daughters doing odd jobs, but she never brought it up in front of us."

She put the file on the table and brought her knees to her chest. She almost looked insecure, but Raven squashed that thought down as far as she could as fast as she could. This was a rare opportunity, and she didn't want anything to ruin it, especially not a stray thought that Emma most certainly would _not_ appreciate.

"I chose babysitting, because I'd learned how to use my powers really well by that point, and kids are easier to emotionally direct than adults." Emma's eyes had a faraway look. "I was good at it. Adriene and Elizabeth, they switched jobs about half a dozen times. But I stuck with mine, because I loved it. I loved working with the kids." The faint echoey wisps of _"I loved the kids and they loved me"_ brushed across Raven's mind, and she was sure Emma hadn't meant for her to hear that. "Daddy said he was so proud of me for sticking with it the whole time. He knew I loved it, but that wasn't the point. It was the determination, the unrelenting will to make it work, that he loved."

Another brief pause followed before Emma shook off the ghosts of days long gone and straightened back out. She ruffled her hair, shaking it out of her face, and Raven had to pretend hard not to see Emma's eyes shine with what certainly wasn't tears. "Good experience. Didn't expect it to pay off this way." There was the feeling – not the tone, never the tone – of a clip at the end of the sentence. She was done talking about it, and she projected that. Raven let it be, and the conversation shifted to girl things.

But she didn't forget.

Neither, she suspected, did Charles, who'd been lingering just outside, cut off from entering to ask Raven something by Emma's unexpected soul-baring.

* * *

It was two weeks that Tommy ended up staying with them. The police found and apprehended the would-be kidnappers, and while Charles was certain that they were only one small cell of a larger network, the fact remained that Tommy could go home.

His parents were more than overjoyed to have their little bundle of happiness back with them. They thanked everyone a hundred times over and promised to bring Tommy back one day, when he was older.

"It was our pleasure," Charles said, grinning.

Emma had accompanied them, had handed Tommy back, and now stood, watching with her polite smile and her straight posture and the uncharacteristic warmth she'd shown over the last two weeks already starting to drain from her eyes. Charles watched her just as intently as he watched the parents while they left. Once they'd pulled away and were heading through the gates, Charles looked up at Emma. She didn't look away from the cherry red car.

"Have you ever wanted kids of your own?" he asked,

The pause of silence, the note of things unsaid but surely felt, the memories that washed over her and drew her newfound emotions away with them, like a tide dragging away a pair of sunglasses, went on too long for her answer to be true. "No." It was cold, it was empty, it was emotionless. That was how Emma appeared as she turned around and walked back into the Mansion.

But there were no secrets between the two telepaths, and this time, Charles couldn't help.


End file.
